I SAID I'D NEVER WRITE A BOOK! What Changed My Mind?

Is there an author in you waiting to emerge? If you had asked me that question 6 months ago, my answer would have been a definitive NO. Blog writing was the extent of my foray into writing. Sometimes I get really excited about a topic and look forward to writing my blog, and sometimes I’m at a complete loss and it is a struggle to come up with a topic for the month. Those months it’s like pulling teeth to find a topic and get words down.

Inspiration for my blog comes from different places. Sometimes a student’s question becomes the inspiration for an article (like my last post). Other times a client’s situation inspires me, or inspiration can also come from what is happening in my own kitchen.

In addition to my clinical practice, I also teach nutrition. I started writing my blog right around the time I started teaching. It was also during that time period that I first started hearing, “Tracey, you should write a book!” It always came from my students, and my response was always the same, “content will be outdated by the time it is published”.

Research in the area of nutrition is changing rapidly. Not only that, but the idea of sifting through all the research was a bit overwhelming. It actually seemed more than a bit overwhelming, but also a very important step if I were ever to write. My blog articles are backed by science, so certainly a larger project would have to be as well.

In short, writing a book seemed overwhelming, when just writing my blog is sometimes a challenge, and there wasn’t anything that really inspired me that hadn’t been done before.

WHAT CHANGED MY MIND?

A couple of years ago I was getting frustrated with own health journey. I had managed to get rid of 90% of my seasonal allergies, my eczema was gone on my left hand, and had improved greatly on my right hand, but I couldn’t get completely rid of chronic sinus inflammation that left me with a low grade sinus headache much of the time, and I really wanted to be rid of my eczema.

Having eczema on my dominant hand was troublesome, because it meant owning many different protective gloves for a variety of tasks like washing dishes, and gardening. Something as simple as slicing a tomato or a peach could aggravate the eczema. I had managed to make significant health improvements by focusing on restoring my gut health, but I felt that I was missing a very important piece of information about my own body.

I was still dependent on steroid cream to manage eczema on my right hand, and had been using it for almost 40 years. It is damaging to skin long term, but I just hadn’t been able to find any other effective way to soothe my insanely itchy, irritated hands.

At the same time that I was wondering what I was missing in my own understanding of my body, I was attracting clients who were only able to tolerate a handful of foods. I mean that literally - they could only eat 5-10 different foods without developing symptoms. They would be reactive to histamines, salicylates, oxalates and fodmaps in foods. They had completely exhausted the medical system, and found no help.

Food should be your medicine, but for some of my clients they felt better when they just didn’t eat. If only that were a sustainable option!

I began to suspect that histamines might be an issue for me too. One of the important clues I had was an occasional inability to hold my bladder. As embarrassing as it is to admit, there were a couple of times where I didn’t get to the toilet in time. I would be in the bathroom frantically trying to get my pants down, but would start trickling urine before my butt could land on the toilet seat.

These episodes happened when I was eating a lot of delicious, homemade yogurt. Yogurt is typically espoused as being great for your gut. And it is! But it is also high in histamines. One of the symptoms of histamine issues is urinary frequency. When there is inflammation in the bladder, it just doesn’t function well, and histamines can be the source of that inflammation. If you think about classic allergy symptoms like itchy eyes and runny nose this makes sense. In the same way that histamines irritate my bladder, they can irritate the eyes and nose of someone with allergies. This can happen ANYWHERE in the body, resulting in a very long list of seemingly unrelated symptoms.

Once I started examining the role of histamines in my health, I had a whole bunch of questions. Was I not good at breaking histamine down? Was my liver not able to clear histamines? Did I have a condition known as Mast Cell Activation Syndrome?

I found a practitioner who could help me answer those questions, and it turned out the answer was YES to all three questions. No wonder I had a life long history of unexplained reactions: hives, rashes, itchy skin, chemical sensitivities, throat tightness, headaches with weather changes, nausea with no apparent cause, extreme welts with bug bites, and blazing eczema over my entire torso along with extreme fatigue when exposed to mold. And of course occasional urinary frequency. Most of the time I could hold my pee for hours at a time, but other times only for very short periods. When that happened it was not conducive to a good night’s sleep, nor would I be the favourite person on road trips!

Now I had myself as a guinea pig to experiment on. I started to delve even further into the research. In the last 3-4 years the scientific community has learned a lot about histamines, along with factors that contribute to Mast Cell Activation. The research is fascinating, but not very practical when you need to cook food that will actually support your body without making histamine issues worse.

Not everyone with histamine mediated health conditions has Mast Cell Activation. Another condition exists called Histamine Intolerance. There are low-histamine cookbooks that exist, and can be helpful for Histamine Intolerance, but what about my clients who reacted to almost everything and could hardly eat anything, or what about gut repair in tandem with managing histamines. How about supporting your liver to help clear histamines?

I realized that there was no comprehensive book that addressed the complexity of histamine issues. No one was creating recipes that were low-histamine in combination with low-salicylate, or low-oxalate, or low-fodmap, or that were mold free or nightshade free. There are many people struggling with a combination of food induced symptoms. I saw a huge need for a resource that addressed this intricacy.

That is why I changed my mind about writing a book. Simply put, a need exists for something that currently does not exist.

WHAT THE BOOK WILL LOOK LIKE

I had a rough idea of what I wanted this book to look like right from the beginning. I want a guide book that explains what histamines are doing in the body, what is contributing to people’s high histamine levels, and how the diet helps. The guide book will be science based, and will also help people identify what kinds of questions to ask their doctor.

The cookbook will contain easy recipes. No long ingredient lists, no complicated instructions, and no ingredients that you might struggle to find.

My amazing colleague, Luka Symons, of Good Food + You, will be my partner for this endeavour. I am really excited to be uniting forces with her. She has her own histamine story, and also works with clients dealing with histamine issues.

We each bring different strengths to this project, which will result in an amazing final book. We manage to fill in the gaps for one another very nicely. Luka is more skilled at savoury dishes that draw on favour combinations from around the world, and I at baking breads, muffins, and rolls, and satisfying that sweet tooth with healthy treats. Together we have an amazing line-up of recipes. With two minds at work, we are creating a guide that will answer any questions about histamine issues. We’re calling it Histamine Haven, because it will be a place where eating food becomes safe and pleasurable again, for all those people who have been scared to eat. It will empower people to help themselves on their wellness journey.

We are hoping to have the book completed, and ready to submit to a publisher in early 2021. I’ve heard it can take a while once a publisher has it for it to be released, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn’t draw out too long. But great news! Our Baked Goods and Sweet Treats e-book is coming in the fall, so you won’t have to wait long to get some great recipes. The e-book is a way for us to finance the rest of the book, so please consider buying it once it’s out to help us finish our project. These recipes are great for anyone who leads a healthy lifestyle.

We’ve been really busy the last few weeks doing photography. If you want to catch a glimpse of some images, and follow the progress of Histamine Haven, follow us on Instagram or Facebook. We’d love for you to follow us on this journey of what will turn out to be an amazing book.

How does someone know they have histamine issues? Do you have seasonal allergies, eczema, asthma, nerve pain, anxiety or depression, GERD, IBS, schizophrenia, interstitial cystitis, fibromyalgia, chronic bladder infections, Parkinson’s…? These are just some of the conditions that are associated with high histamine levels. But I think that will be a topic for another day (with links to the research of course)!

Happy, Healthy Eating!
Tracey

-------------------------

By: Tracey Reed
Title: I SAID I'D NEVER WRITE A BOOK! What Changed My Mind?
Sourced From: www.traceyreed.ca/blog/2020/7/13/i-said-id-never-write-a-book-why-i-changed-my-mind
Published Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 17:41:56 +0000